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The fear stalking the consulting industry right now comes in two flavors. The first is that AI can’t be trusted — that the same tools promising to transform client work will confidently produce wrong answers, expose firms to liability, and erode the hard-won trust that is the entire basis of the business. The second fear is almost the opposite: that AI works just fine, and that the companies building it will eventually use their growing power — and consulting firms’ own client data — to cut the middleman out entirely.
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Into the midst of this anxiety strode big blue with big news: KPMG dropped a bombshell on Monday, announcing a global alliance with Anthropic to embed Claude, the AI company’s flagship model, directly into Digital Gateway, the client delivery platform where KPMG’s 276,000-person global workforce does its actual work — auditing, advising, structuring deals, preparing taxes for some of the world’s largest companies. PwC announced its own Claude deal in the same week, although KPMG’s is unique in its “powered by Claude” capability and full integration into KPMG’s platform.
Every employee, in every one of the 138 countries where KPMG operates, will now have access to Claude. The firm is also becoming Anthropic’s preferred consulting partner for private equity, meaning it will help PE firms deploy AI inside their portfolio companies. It is, by any measure, the most sweeping AI commitment any Big Four firm has made.
Fortune spoke with three of the executives who built the deal to unpack why KPMG is embracing the disruption, even as outside critics are puzzled that AI is getting into the consulting business. Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, the thought leader who coined the “jagged frontier” framing for AI progress, said on Thursday at the Sana AI Summit that it’s “weird” that AI companies are building their own consulting arms to do AI deployment, noting that it contradicts the value proposition of generative AI. “If the models are so good that you think they’re going to destroy all white-collar jobs, shouldn’t they also be able to help you deploy systems?”
Chamath Palihapitiya, the one-time SPAC king and Silicon Valley gadfly, offered a hot take in a widely shared post last week, warning that consulting firms doing business with Anthropic and its ilk was like “letting the fox into the hen house.” To the KPMG executives who struck the deal, it’s a “game-changer,” but in what direction remains an open question.
Only 5% of interactions lead to meaningful outcomes
Rema Serafi, the Vice Chair of Tax at KPMG US, was in Miami when the deal went public — announced live from the stage at the firm’s annual Tax Summit, in front of 900 attendees, half of them clients, with Anthropic executives joining her on stage. She described the moment as “monumental” and said KPMG is excited. “We know that this is a game-changer. We know that this novel approach — this is different, it felt different. People know that we’re not talking about a chatbot on the side.”
But she was also strikingly candid about how far the industry still has to go.
Serafi referred to joint research by KPMG and the University of Texas at Austin, published in the March issue of Harvard Business Review, which analyzed over 1.4 million interactions between KPMG professionals and AI. “Only 5% of those interactions were people getting meaningful outcomes,” she pointed out. The number sounds alarming and aligns exactly with what Fortune reported last summer: 95% of corporate generative AI pilots failed, although several critics have questioned that methodology, including Wharton’s Ethan Mollick.
KPMG defined meaningful adoption in the form of “sophisticated AI users,” or employees who were not defined by technical skill or frequency of use, but by patterns of engagement. They treat AI as a “reasoning partner” to think with, aligning closely with what AI expert Vivienne Ming calls “cyborgs,” or people who lose track of what ideas came from their own human brains or their AI partners. When asked about that phrasing, Serafi preferred the term “helpers” — not replacing professionals, but teams of AI agents working alongside them, handling the repetitive steps in the process so that humans can focus on the work that actually requires judgment.
The 5% sophistication number was framed as a positive by Serafi. “To me, that’s actually encouraging,” she said. “We’ve got these really powerful tools out there, and we have people who are ambitious and they want to learn how to use the tools but we haven’t maximized the utility they get out of AI.”
That gap is precisely what KPMG is trying to close — and it’s why, Serafi argues, the deal with Anthropic is less about technology than it is about talent. As Fortune reported in January, the firm has developed a “Think, Prompt, Check” training methodology for all of its professionals, drilling into them not just how to use AI but how to interrogate what it gives back. KPMG says it’s meant t